Suzy Kim

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Professor Kim began teaching Korean Studies at Rutgers in 2010 and has previously taught at Emerson College, Boston College, and Oberlin College after receiving her Ph.D. in Modern Korean History at the University of Chicago. Her current research focuses on North Korean social history, looking at changes in everyday life between 1945 after the end of Japanese colonial rule to 1950 before the start of the Korean War. Her research interests include critical theory, gender studies, and oral history.

She is currently working on a manuscript titled Politics of Empowerment: Everyday Life in North Korea 1945-50, examining the immediate post-colonial period of North Korean history from 1945 when Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule to 1950 before the start of the Korean War. Focusing on the local people's committees and mass organizations that were spontaneously organized and later centralized, she reconstructs the beginnings of North Korean society through a micro-level study of everyday life, informing more generally the underlying dynamic of how processes of social change come together with processes of ossification in the dialectic between agency and structure.